In both of these articles we made note of the fact that the New Orleans District Attorney and the Innocence Project – New Orleans had agreed to establish a joint conviction integrity unit. This would be “ground breaking” for a prosecutor to team up with an innocence organization for this, because it would provide absolutely objective oversight of the CIU (which none of them have, because they are totally contained within the prosecutor’s office); and we said this will bear careful watching.

In the second of the above articles, we stated that when the conviction integrity units eventually start to be disbanded (which I believe they will), we will hear one of these reasons, or a combination of the two, as the justification:

1) We’ve fixed everything there was to fix, and we promise to behave ourselves in the future, so the CIU is no longer needed.

2) Budget constraints and the requirements of ongoing prosecutions force us to apply the resource devoted to the CIU to more urgent business.

Please see Mark Godsey’s “Quick Clicks” from Monday, Jan. 11, 2016 here for news that the project between the New Orleans District Attorney’s office and the Innocence Project – New Orleans to form a joint conviction integrity team has been abandoned. And the reason? Budget.

Hmmm. Really?

Final comment. The very existence of “conviction integrity units” begs the question – why? Because they can’t get it right the first time? But given that honest errors leading to a wrongful conviction may occur, leaving it to the prosecutors to correct their own mistakes and misdeeds is not the right way to do it. Having prosecutors oversee prosecutors is like having cops oversee cops, and we know how that works.

The case of Andrew Mallard (pictured here) will be well known to those in Australia – he was wrongly convicted in 1995 of the murder of two women in Western Australia, spending 12 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Mallard was eventually awarded AU$3.25 for his 12 years wrongly imprisoned, but the litany of ‘errors’ during the police investigation continue to come to light.

The real perpetrator was never convicted of the murders, he committed suicide in 2006 after being named as prime suspect by the police subsequent to a cold case review. However, during this review, and other subsequent inquiries into the policing handling of the murders, many questions have been raised about the police handling of evidence and exhibits – with many being claimed to be “lost”, now appearing on exhibit lists during a police audit – at the same time the police claimed to have lost the exhibits. Is this incompetence of malfeasance?

The whole investigation, the police handling of the evidence, the wrongful conviction and the ongoing shambles – should leave all Western Australia police and judicial system ashamed. There is a wealth of material to read on the Mallard case, as there have been so many official inquiries into the case. For more on the media coverage of recent revelations read here:

Since the high profile exoneration of Teina Pora (see here…) and lots of calls for reforms in New Zealand, including a body to look at miscarriages of justice, the newly created New Zealand Public Interest Project (NZPIP) has now started work. A charitable organisation, it plans to look into cases as well as wider concerns about the operation of the NZ criminal justice system. The body already has a queue of high profile cases in which a prisoner is claiming innocence. While good news…. it is not a government backed (or funded) body… which should have been the response to growing concerns about the justice system in New Zealand. One hopes that if they can bring attention, and overturn, further miscarriages of justice, the government will take the issue seriously and set up a funded body. Read more here….

In yet another encouraging sign the the ‘problem’ of miscarriages of justice is starting to be taken more seriously globally – the National Assembly of Vietnam has this week been debating the issue of wrongful convictions. In a courageous move, a standing committee looking at wrongful convictions and compensation, admitted that while most investigations and prosecutions were carried out in adherence with rules and upheld human rights, there were some ‘weaknesses and shortcomings’. The report states that between October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2014, there were 71 wrongful convictions – a rate of 0.02 per cent. Although a ‘small’ number, they admitted: “Some serious cases created extreme anxiety among the public, eroding many people’s confidence in our justice system and damaging the prestige of our law enforcement agencies.”. However, with 80% of trials in Vietnam taking place with NO defence counsel, and the country still reportedly ‘trying hard’ to eradicate torture and coerced confessions, it may be questionable how the figure of 71 was reached… and it’s accuracy. Despite this scepticism, it is still heartening that such reports are being published. Read more here…

Making deals with snitches — just one of the more loathsome practices of prosecutors, and it happens all the time. Here’s how it works. A prison inmate (snitch) who has contact in prison with the defendant in a case comes forward, and claims that the defendant confessed to him in prison, or that the defendant bragged about the crime, or said things that implicated himself in the crime. In “exchange” for his testimony against the defendant the snitch is granted favorable treatment by the prosecutor – reduced sentence, reduced charges, early release, etc. Snitches can also be people who are not in prison, and get paid money for their testimony, or have pending charges dropped. Snitch testimony is often totally fabricated, and the snitch is lying just to get the deal from the prosecutor or to get the money. Snitches will read newspaper reports of crimes to learn just enough detail about a crime to give some credibility to their fake claims about what the defendant said to them. And when prosecutors put snitches on the witness stand, you can’t tell me they don’t know the testimony is bogus. However, it’s not uncommon for snitch testimony to be the deciding factor in a conviction.

North Carolina has been among the leaders in addressing the problem of wrongful convictions, including establishing the first state innocence commission, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, in 2002. And recently in North Carolina, the issue of perjurious snitch testimony has bubbled to the surface. A bill under consideration in the legislature would bar a conviction based solely upon incentivized (snitch) testimony. However, that bill has now essentially died in the legislature after intense lobbying from the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys.

This from the publication INDY Week: “Supporters called it one of the strongest bills in the country that would protect criminal defendants from lying jailhouse snitches. But now, the I. Beverly Lake, Jr., Fair Trial Act is on life support, blocked by N.C. House leadership after pressure from the state’s Conference of District Attorneys.”

Given North Carolina’s heretofore forward thinking on wrongful convictions, I am dismayed by this; but, it’s just yet another obstacle to overcome – so upward and onward. The fact that this bill has even been under consideration is a source of encouragement, because it means that some legislators actually understand some of the problems.